THE SIMPLE PRINCE

An idle prince who simply claps his hands for service decides to go off and lead the simple life in the house of a poor farmer. But when he claps his hands for tea he finds that he has to saw wood for the fire and fetch water from a well before tea can be made. Likewise, butter begins with milking the cow and bread with kneading the dough, and soon the prince, finding the simple life much too hard, "galloped back to the castle as fast as he could go." And thereafter he makes polite requests of his servants instead of clapping his hands—hardly a radical transformation. There's more of Kent's lowest-common-denominator approach than of Yolen's characteristic preciousness here. The story is brisk and simple, but not much comes of it.